This week our CEO, Ankur Srivastava, and President, Alex Limeres, sat down with one of our top sales professionals, Jim Meyer, to discuss his experience with sales in the gig economy.

Ankur: Hey there everybody. Ankur and Alex here with Swarmsales and we are really excited to talk to you guys about one of the top sales professionals in our marketplace who delivered a six-figure closed. You guys have heard us talk about him over and over on LinkedIn and our blogs and we still can’t stop talking about him. And rightly so. I want to welcome Mr. Jim Meyer. Welcome, Jim. Thanks for taking the time to talk to Alex and me.

Jim Meyer: Well thank you for inviting me out here I’m kind of humbled by your introduction. I’m just a regular sales guy but thanks for giving me a chance to say hi.

Ankur: That’s the one thing that we want to make sure that we eliminate is that you don’t feel like you’re a regular sales guy. You know, maybe before we go into it today, I’d love to get a little bit of background for the audience and the people listening about who you are, what your background has been, and then if you don’t mind, we’ll go into how you found Swarmsales. Then talk a little bit about the journey does that sound okay?

Jim: Sounds fantastic.

Ankur: Great. So, let’s talk a little bit about you. Just tell us a little bit about your background if you don’t mind.

Jim: All right. So, I’m an engineer with an MBA. I’ve been in the sales organizations for quite a long time. In that period, most of the time has been as a sales professional or as a sales management guy. My focus has mostly been in the telco utilities or bigger enterprises that use Telco type internals infrastructure. And in the last four years, I’ve been really running my own business, kind of representing independent companies that are looking to get into the North American market; some are foreign, some are domestic. Then I kind of came across you guys a couple years ago.

Alex: And tell us Jim, how did how did you find us?

Jim: That’s actually an interesting question. I honestly don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but I was doing some work chatting with folks at CenturyLink. Some of you guys may have heard of them. You know it’s a larger US telco, and I was talking to one of their Business Develop guys. And he was like, “oh yeah there’s this cool company now that I understand what you do, Jim,” he says “there’s this company called Swarmsales and they are kind of a clearinghouse of sales guys that are independent reaching out with different vendors that are independent and seeing that they work out some mutual partnership.” So, that’s how I first heard about you guys was with Centurylink.

Ankur: That’s great. Now talk to us a little bit about what you experienced when you jumped on the marketplace. How was the on-boarding process? How quickly were you able to identify a company that you were able to work with?

Jim: Well, getting on board with you guys was really easy once I found out and signed up. I started perusing the different types of solutions that you were offering. For me it was really kind of an easy starting point because you take a look at who your customers are today, who your contacts are, and you can sort of marry different types of solutions that would be beneficial or up-sell to those types of organizations you’re already dealing with. You can talk more about some core things that would kind of fit, or you can actually go off in some tangential. Let’s say you’re talking more to IT and engineering folks but -you guys have for example, some marketing solutions that you could also parlay over that part of the organization. So, it was really easy just looking around to see what kind of companies you had. Just look to see what types of companies those folks were looking to get into. Then it was just the process of what you call bidding to say, ‘hey, my name is Jim. Here’s my background. Here’s what I know. I think I can help you at company X or company Y.’ Then it’s just up to those other vendors to say, ‘Yeah, hey let’s go try this.’ So, really easy process. Then obviously, you can expand upon that if you want to go look at other further ones once you kind of get your feet wet and get comfortable.

Alex: I was gonna say, how many companies have you engaged with on Swarmsales, and do you have any best practices to share?

Jim: It’s probably been six or seven different companies that I’ve engaged with. There was a couple that didn’t seem so much of a good match. But of that handful -six or seven- I did reach out to several different companies in my network and there’s a handful of companies right now that I’m interacting with; your vendor folks. Obviously you know about the one that we closed. There’s several others that I’m working to bring across the goal-line as well some in that same solution type and some others.

Ankur: Jim, one of the things that obviously you’ve talked about and several sales professionals talk about on our marketplace is our compensation model, which is unique. There’s a traditional model and then there’s a Swarmsales model. If you don’t mind, could you just do a little bit of a comparison between the two, and tell us what did you find beneficial? And if not, we’re open to that feedback as well about the compensation model that we have versus what you were going to do.

Jim: The compensation is really very similar to what I experienced doing my own business before I even joined you guys. You have a little more of an interactive update capability where you get a little money for introductions, a little bit for a demo, a little bit for proof of concept and close. Sometimes in my situation, I didn’t have those little iterative steps, but the payment that you guys give on Swarmsales is pretty comparable to what you would have teed up by helping another company out. Then of course you’re comp plan on a closed deal is really pretty competitive. The companies vary a little bit in what they’re willing to pay but it’s pretty much the norm for what I saw even before I came across you guys.

Ankur: In terms of engaging with these companies, was it fairly easy to to do? What is your feedback on that? Is what we provided you with adequate knowledge and information to learn enough about the company and to be able to engage them into their accounts?

Jim: Yeah, you guys may actually do better than some of the companies I talked to because you it seems that you guys always want to have the core. Your battle card, which includes the pricing, some of the documentation that supports the products, and videos or demos. Some of the guys I’ve talked to- they’re really kind of rudimentary. They don’t have a PowerPoint that talks about the product. They’re super young and they’re trying to get their feet, you know, on ground so they can do something. So I’d say, if anything, you guys in some cases are better than some of these companies that are out there by what you guys force the vendors to provide for us.

Search

Search for:

Text Widget

This is a text widget, which allows you to add text or HTML to your sidebar. You can use them to display text, links, images, HTML, or a combination of these. Edit them in the Widget section of the Customizer.